Venitism is a free-content business blog. Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com

THE BIGGEST OVERHAUL OF THE U.S. TAX CODE IN 30 YEARS

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives gave final approval on Wednesday to the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in 30 years. In sealing Trump’s first major legislative victory since he took office in January, Republicans steamrolled opposition from Democrats to pass a bill that slashes taxes.

It makes no sense to tax corporations at all, because only people pay taxes, not legal entities. The corporate tax is really paid by consumers in terms of higher prices. Every single dollar of corporate tax is transferred to customers. This is an invisible consumer tax!

All taxes and regulatory burdens are transferred to individual consumers. If you added all of them, your tax rate is really 90%! This means you are a slave of your government, pure and simple. The only way out is to abolish government or bypass government.

According to Arthur Laffer, the low-tax states belong to a different genus entirely. It’s like comparing Hong Kong with Greece or King Kong with fleas! Occident must minimize taxes to single digits, abolish sales taxes and VAT, and not even think about financial transactions tax. Starve the beast by fighting taxes.

The House approved the measure by 224-201, passing it for the second time in two days after a procedural foul-up forced another vote on Wednesday. The Republican-led Senate had passed it 51-48 in the early hours of Wednesday.

“We are making America great again,” Trump said, echoing his campaign slogan at a White House celebration with Republican lawmakers. “Ultimately what does it mean? It means jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Trump, who emphasized a tax cut for middle-class Americans during his 2016 campaign, said at an earlier Cabinet meeting that lowering the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent was “probably the biggest factor in this plan.”

It was uncertain when the bill would be signed. White House economic adviser Gary Cohn told us the timing depended on whether automatic spending cuts triggered by the legislation could be waived.

The administration expects the waiver to be included in a spending resolution Congress will pass later this week, a White House official told reporters. Cohn told us on Wednesday night that Trump could sign the bill as soon as Friday if the resolution was passed by then. “If not, most likely we’ll sign it in the first week of the new year,” Cohn told us.

In addition to cutting the U.S. corporate income tax rate, the debt-financed legislation gives other business owners a new 20 percent deduction on business income and reshapes how the government taxes multinational corporations along the lines that the country’s largest businesses have recommended for years.

Under the bill, millions of Americans would stop itemizing deductions, putting tax breaks that incentivize home ownership and charitable donations out of their reach, but also making tax returns somewhat simpler and shorter.

The bill keeps the existing number of tax brackets but adjusts many of the rates and income levels for each one. The top tax rate for high earners is reduced. The estate tax on inheritances is changed so far fewer people will pay.

Once signed, taxpayers likely would see the first changes to their paycheck tax withholdings in February. Most households will not see the full effect of the tax plan on their income until they file their 2018 taxes in early 2019.

In two provisions added to secure needed Republican votes, the legislation also allows oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and removes a tax penalty under the Obamacare health law for Americans who do not obtain health insurance.

“We have essentially repealed Obamacare and we’ll come up with something that will be much better,” Trump said.

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan defended the bill, saying support would grow for after it passes and Americans felt relief. “I think minds are going to change,” Ryan told us.

Atlas upon seeing that the greater his effort, the heavier the world bores down on his shoulders, he simply shrugs. We have a dystopian Occident, where capitalists refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and regulations and disappear offshore. Yes, capitalists are on strike! They are stopping the motor of the world by withdrawing their minds that drive growth and productivity. Capitalists demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, civilization cannot exist where capitalists are slaves of kleptocrats, and the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. Atlas shrugged!

Taxes, especially VAT, feed the underground economy. It is your patriotic duty to evade taxes, especially VAT, all the way! Taxation causes an enormous and unnecessary dead-weight loss to the economic system. The sheer cost and time burden of businesses and individuals trying to comply with the tax system, let alone the cost of myriad bureaucrats who claim to be administrating it, waste trillions of euros. This waste of resources unnecessarily reduces economic growth and job creation. A major reason this obscenity persists is that few kleptocrats think seriously about the consequences of what they have done and are doing, or just don’t care.

All other persons and groups in society, except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers, obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift. Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as taxation. Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.

There was no permanent income tax in the United States for 125 years. Can anyone possibly say that the government didn’t have enough revenue to function during that time? It wasn’t until the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 that the redistributionist road was paved for an income tax. And what benefits has the increased government revenue from the income tax given us? It is the income tax that has made possible World War I, the New Deal, World War II, the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and our current welfare-warfare state.

Every penny of our money that the government allows us to keep is a good thing, whether it results from a decrease in the tax rates, the lowering of tax brackets, or an increase in deductions, loopholes, exemptions, and credits.

The income tax system is a vast income redistribution and social engineering scheme. The income tax code doesn’t need to be simplified, shortened, fairer, or less intrusive. The income tax rates don’t need to be made lower, flatter, equal, or less progressive. The income tax doesn’t need more or larger deductions, loopholes, credits, or exemptions. The whole rotten system needs to be eliminated if we are to starve the beast that is the state leviathan and strictly limit government spending to only what is constitutionally authorized.

When an economy suffers from erectile dysfunction, via-grab does not work, but only via-cut. The via recommended is to cut taxes, not grab more taxes. There are limits to how much government can tax before it kills the host. Even worse, when government attempts to subsidize prices, it has the net effect of inflating them instead. The economic reality is that you cannot distort natural market pressures without unintended consequences. Market forces would drive prices down. Government meddling negates these pressures, adds regulatory compliance costs and layers of bureaucracy, and in the end, drives prices up.

Millions of innocent people have died of hypertension caused by agony on taxes. Millions of concerned citizens are joining modern day tea parties of the Global Tax Revolt, named after the Boston Tea Party of 1773. They are protesting governments that, in the wake of today’s financial crisis, are rapidly strangling their freedom, with endless bailouts, mounting regulations, reckless spending, and the promise of a crippling tax burden. Correctly sensing that freedom is being discarded, they seek to battle this trend by taking to the streets to register their outrage.

Government does not trickle the money down or up. Government simply spends it, almost always wastefully. There’s a simple moral and psychological explanation for this. When you’re given money, or seize money by force, in the case of taxes it’s legalized plunder, then you don’t handle that money as responsibly as you would if it were your own.

There’s no way to control wasteful government spending because government spending will always, by its nature, be largely wasteful and irresponsible. The only solution to this is to severely limit the role of government as much as possible. Lower taxes are a good thing not only because they leave wealth in the hands of the more productive; low taxes are also good, because the government has less to do.

If you think the West has been productive and prosperous up to now, just imagine how it would be if most of government as we know it went away. It’s bad enough that government takes income from the private sector and squanders it. Government is making decisions that people should be making for themselves. If something isn’t going to happen without government funds, then it quite likely should not happen in the first place. When people make decisions for themselves, they generally do a better job. And when they make a mistake, or perhaps act with deliberate irrationality, at least there are consequences for their actions. When government does something badly, it gets rewarded with more power, subsidies and control.

While everyone needs revenue, only criminals and politicians insist that they have to get it through violence. The criminals, however, do not pretend they’re doing it in order to serve the public, and taxes make politicians public masters rather than public servants.

The present size of government at all levels depends on taxation – not only the explicit kind, but the invisible kind that a central bank imposes through inflation of the money supply. People probably wouldn’t voluntarily pay to bomb, invade, and occupy other countries, bail out large banks and other corporations, and try to dictate the personal choices of others. Good riddance!

Government-monopolized services such as education and health care could be provided for less than half the cost if they could be returned to the voluntary sector of society with cost-raising regulations abolished and incentives restored. Both mutual aid groups and charitable donations filled gaps prior to the rise of the Welfare State for those in need with an efficiency that is impossible when those in charge of aid get more money and power for themselves the worse the job they perform. We’ll have to take some personal responsibility for our own lives and stop using the excuse Ebenezer Scrooge made that his taxes supported institutions for the poor so he could ignore them.

It is obscene for those claiming to protect life, liberty, and property to obtain their revenue by violating life, liberty, and property. There are plenty of ways to obtain revenue without force: insurance, user fees, advertising, lotteries, and donations are already used by many local and state governments for a good portion of their revenue. Let them be true public servants and live within the means that these sources provide. People might even pay more voluntarily once they’re no longer forced to turn over 1/3 to 1/2 of their wealth to governments.

Ultimately, it is about the type of society we want to have. We can accomplish a lot voluntarily when we mutually respect each other’s lives and property. It begins by respecting the right of people to keep the fruits of their labor. A good start would be the abolition of the personal income tax, which only adds insult to the injury of theft by invading every part of the taxpayer’s privacy as well as making April a month of misery instead of a time to enjoy the spring.

With the average worker at the time earning about $1,000 a year, it was considered a reflection of being somewhat well off if you had to pay a tax. Reportedly, some 350,000 individuals were entitled to such bragging rights.